"My favorite was the larger scientific community last year poo-pooing the claims by a couple of physicists that the LHC would create a catastrophic black hole.

A couple of weeks later, some peer review came out saying, in effect, "oops, maybe they have a point."

Source?

My apologies for asking, but I've sort of followed the supposed "catastrophic black hole" issue, and I had thought that physicists have been saying from the very beginning that if any were created, they'd be so tiny (25 femtograms, which translates into having an event horizon that's dwarfed by a proton. Dwarfed by several orders of magnitude, in fact) and, due to Hawking radiation, have such a small lifespan that there's no way - zero - that they'd have any real, noticible effect. Their lifespan would be far, far shorter than the amount of time it would take to suck in a single gram of matter (due to it's size and known density of the earth's crust, mantle, and core, that would be 3 billion years). I don't recall any backtracking, but if I'm remembering things wrong, I want to be corrected.

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The Al Qaeda-linked physicist thing pisses me off to no end. Vet your people, CERN! Unless you want to see a $6 billion dollar facility take real damage, be put behind even further, and possibly get some scientists harmed. I swear, there are times when I wonder just how seriously Europeans take Islamic militant radicalism.

rollingdivision, that explanation might be more believable had the LHC been shut down by some very improbable event. Suppose that a satellite's orbit decays, and a large chunk of it survives re-entry, and it happens to hit the LHC.

But in this case, I'm starting to suspect that the LHC isn't being sabotaged by some causation-loop where the universe "abhors" its own annihilation; but rather by the more pedestrian fact that it's engineered like a real piece-of-shit.

I had a Renault in the late 80s that could have been shut down by a bit of bread dropped by a bird, too. I wonder if the LHC was built by some former Renault Encore designers.

Seriously -- the designers didn't anticipate that a bird or squirrel or the European equivalent of a racoon or possum might drop, or place, or shit, something onto this device? Was it just designed and fabricated entirely by PhDs, with no engineers involved at all?

Tibore - The Al Qaeda-linked physicist thing pisses me off to no end. Vet your people, CERN! Unless you want to see a $6 billion dollar facility take real damage, be put behind even further, and possibly get some scientists harmed. I swear, there are times when I wonder just how seriously Europeans take Islamic militant radicalism.

The Euros sniffed out and nailed the Islamoids - neither who worked inside the facility in sensitive areas, BTW.

That makes the Euros leagues better than the US Army and the FBI with respect to "I love holy suicide bombers" Nidal Hasan....who was covered in so many red flags it was a miracle he was able to reach underneath them all and find his trusty two pistols.

In terms of the LHC, the Hitchcock reference that came to mind for me was from Sabotage, where a blackout was caused by somebody pouring sand into some crucial component in the city's power grid. (I never understood how that actually worked, but if a chunk of croissant can stop a Large Hadron Collider . . .)

Somewhat OT: Hitchcock's a theme today. Before dinner, my girlfriend and I are going to watch either Rebecca or Suspicion, although the more celebrated former may lose out to the slightly flawed latter. ("Suspicion" is a half-hour shorter.)

The teory is not that it may be someone from the future, but it may be nature or God. The LHC will create a particle that is so abhorant to the universe that the universive is doing everything in its power to stop it.